*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now

*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated "the better angels of their natures" have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town.

One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 and beyond still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight these idealistic youth were pursuing, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed. Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own, their own young if they got out of line).

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism's imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact (with a whole ready to take his place come 2016).

The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          
******
No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition  and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere  that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial  observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenburg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation of '68) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.

It is almost a political truism that each generation of radicals and revolutionaries will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size and importance of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not felt they needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

*From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- "For New October Revolutions!"

Click on the headline to link to "Workers Vanguard", dated October 26, 2007, for the article on the subject noted above.

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind   

By Sam Lowell

Zack James when he was younger, much younger back in the early 1960s younger, now too for that matter was, well, how can we put it, maybe women-addled would be best. Ever since the end of high school, the beginning of college except for one short period he had always had some kind of woman relationship to confuse his sweet ass life (he hadn’t been very successful in high school too shy and too poor to make a hit with any of his female fellow high-schoolers so the end of high school seems the right place to start his women-addledness [sic]). Of late that streak had taken a sudden stop his latest flame of the past few years, Loretta, had flown the coop, had given him his walking papers, had decided that they had drifted too far apart, that she wanted to find herself, see who she was and what she would do with the rest of her life. Fair enough although the pain of her departure for parts unknown left a big hole in his heart, left him bereft for a while. But had also given him time to see what he was about, where he wanted to head.   

A lot of what Loretta had said about the need for her to cut Zack loose was dead-on, was right as she had been usually right about what ailed Zack. He always found himself behind the curve when it came to what Loretta was thinking about, what he was able to reflect in the lonely hours that he had recently spent in the house they had shared together over the previous several years. Had had to agree that the last year of so as his health had declined with some fairly serious medical issues which had required that he take some medicines that seem to pile up on each other and had made him, well, grumpy and cranky, a grumpy cranky old man if the truth be known especially as those medical problems dove-tailed with his turning three score and ten, turning seventy to not be cute about it. Had made him aware as never before of his own mortality and instead of taking it easy, instead of increasingly relaxing, instead of being at peace with himself, instead of trying to put out the fire in his head he was more driven than ever to find his place in the sun, to have his life have meaning at the end. As to his relationship with Loretta he had let himself drift apart, left her unattended, and okay left her to seek her own newer world.

During some of those lonely hours in that desolate house which creaked eerily to his ears Zack began to think through his whole life, who was he kidding his whole relationship with the women who had festooned his sweet ass life, had made life bearable for him. What he had found out, was trying to think through is that he really needed, very much needed the companionship of a woman, and if it was not going to be Loretta, hell, she essentially left no forwarding address all he had was her cellphone number so she could be anywhere, then it had to be somebody else. Rather than go right out and jump into the “meat market,” that is what they called it when he was younger and if they had a different name for the process it was still the same ordeal he decided that he had better take stock of himself and where he has been, and what he wanted out of a relationship now. Any reflection on his apart about failed relationships, and there were plenty, always, always, always led him back to the “cowgirl in the sand,” always led him back to Mariah Welsh, back when he decided  he wanted his first serious relationship.       

That “cowgirl in the sand” was no cute inside joke and it still pained Zack to even think about Mariah and how she led him a merry chase in that one summer, the summer of 1966, they had stayed together. See Mariah was actually from the West, had grown up on a big cattle ranch just outside of Cheyenne out in Wyoming country and had some certain set western ways for a young woman of twenty. He had met her down in Falmouth, down in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts about fifty miles from where he lived, down near the beach in the summer of 1966 just after his sophomore year in college. He had been renting a place with several other fellow college students for the summer who were as dedicated to partying as he was and that was that. He had actually seen her a couple of times on the beach at Falmouth Heights near where they had rented the cottage and thought that she looked very fine in her skimpy bikini (then skimpy which today would be considered modest) but was not sure how to approach her. One day he decided to go up and invite her to the weekly weekend party that his cottage put on and see what happened. (That weekend party almost literally true as the party would start early Friday afternoon and end at some Happy Hour bar early Sunday evening inevitably a few people, including Zack, would carry over until Monday or Tuesday if the spirit moved them or they had some hot date that kept the fires burning that long).

As Zack approached her she had brought him up short when she saw him coming and shouted out “Here comes the boy who had been checking me out, checking out my shape as far as I could tell and who knows what else he was thinking about, but was afraid to come up and say hello.” Yeah, that was the kind of girl, young woman, Mariah was all through that hot summer relationship. She claimed one night when they had gotten better acquainted that unlike uptight people from the East Coast people from the West, from cattle country, were more plainspoken, less hung up about speaking out about what they wanted-or who they wanted. Needless to say Zack and Mariah spent the rest of that afternoon talking about this and that, mostly dreary college stuff since Mariah was also a student at the University of Wyoming studying art. (She was an exceptionally good artist, had drawn a couple of charcoal drawings of him which he had kept for years afterward even when he was married to Josie, his first wife, and Josie had asked who had done it and he had foolishly told her and he had to hide the damn things. Josie had later when they were separating torn the works up-yes, it was that kind of breakup). As they talked Mariah made no bones about showing off her very fine body, slender, small but firm breasts which he was attracted in woman, well-turned long legs and thin ankles, blondish brown hair, sea blue eyes and a wicked smile that would melt butter on a cold day. They made that primal connection that said they had something to do together what it would be who knew but something.

Mariah had told Zack that she had come East with a couple of her college girlfriends since none of them had ever been east of the Mississippi and had been thrilled when they first saw the ocean, had frolicked in the waves and one girl had almost gone under when a sudden riptide which they were totally ignorant of started pulling her down. But that scare was soon over since the girl had allowed herself to drift until the current subsided. They were staying for the summer over on Maravista a few blocks away from the beach (and maybe half a dozen blocks away from Zack’s cottage) in a tiny cottage in back of the landlord’s yard which he usually let out to students who worked in the restaurants and such places for the summer. As the hot tanning sun began to fade a bit by four Zack then popped the question of whether she and her girlfriends were up for a party that weekend. All Mariah asked about though was would there be booze and dope there. When Zack answered yes Mariah said they would surely, her word, be there and she had better not see him talking to some other girl when she arrived. Bingo. That booze and dope stuff needs a little explaining since Zack and his fellows were all under official drinking age (as were Mariah and her friends at least in Massachusetts) so they “hired” an older guy who was living with a bunch of his older friends up their street to “buy” for them and he would get a big bottle of liquor, usually scotch, as his service charge. The dope thing was a little more problematic since dope, marijuana, maybe some speed when a connection could be made, were not that widely used then by the youth fresh college generation although that movement was beginning to build up a head of steam. At that time “booze heads,” representing a more working class ethos and “dopers” were at loggerheads something that would get settled out later in the decade. Jazz, one of his roommates at their cottage and at school, had connections in Cambridge and so they never lacked for dope although more than a few girls would back off once they smelled the dope and didn’t know what the hell they were in for. So Mariah already was ahead of that crowd.       

As they were getting ready to part company after Zack gave Mariah his address and had told her to come by anytime on Friday afternoon or later Mariah told him to wait a minute until she put her street clothes on and they could walk off the beach together toward her car (Zack had walked over to the beach since he unlike several of his roommates did not have a car and was driven down by Willy another roommate). Zack was shocked, mildly shocked anyway, when Mariah put on her blue jean shorts, a frilly lacy cowgirl-type blouse, and, get this, her cowboy boots, and her cowgirl hat what he would later find out was called a Ladies’ Stetson. She looked like she had just gotten ready to go to the rodeo, or the state fair. Something told Zack that this was going to be an interesting ride indeed. Mariah must have sensed that because as they approached her car for her to leave she asked Zack whether he liked her outfit, and then said in her plain spoken Western way, “Maybe you can play cowboy with me if things work out.” Giving Zack a soft sexy look like if things worked out she would give him a ride he would not forget. Whoa!                             

That Friday evening Mariah and her two girlfriends arrived, guess what, dressed up very similarly to the way Mariah had been dressed as she and Zack left the beach a few days before which caused a sensation, a sensation at the novelty of the garb in Falmouth in the summer and also that the two girlfriends were “hot” as well. Zack fortunately was alone when they entered (he had earlier been talking to Cissie, an old flame whom he figured to rekindle a flame with that nightsince he had frankly given up the idea that Mariah was going to show, it would not have been the first time, or the last, some young thing had promised the moon to him and never showed up). Mariah came right over and asked if he had a joint, a joint she said to calm her nerves, make her feel good among the party-goers all of whom were eying her the guys for obvious reasons the women also for obvious reasons if they were with a guy.

Zack called over to Jazz who delivered a huge joint from dope he had “connected” with only that afternoon which made Mariah eyes widen and after taking a few “hits” said to Zack “You may be playing cowboy tonight after all.” In that instance her statement proved not to be true because she got so “wasted” that she fell asleep but the next night’s party, or really a continuation of Friday’s party she and Zack got it on in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs (not his room, the room where he had all his possessions, but nobody was particular about such arrangements when a “hot” date needed a place to put her head down).                         

What struck Zack about Mariah (beside that Western plain-spokenness that he was not used to with the local girls, mostly Irish girls who descended on the Cape with as the saying went “ten dollars and their virtue” and left with both intact or standoffish WASPish girls from the better colleges who were sometimes more trouble than they were worth in trying to get next to them if you were not seriously looking to be upward mobile after your college hijinks) was how sexually experienced and into doing sex she was even that first night when she did a lot of stuff that most other girls he knew were into, like giving a good blow job. When they talked about it later Mariah told him that those cowboys out in the West, the ones who worked for her father broke her in early at thirteen and she liked it, liked it enough to read books in high school about various sexual positions and practices from a manual. (It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian bible of sex for those who are clueless).

So for several weeks that summer Zack and Mariah were what would be called an “item” today, were almost inseparable. Went to the beach, partied, had great sex (mostly based on her knowledge and Zack’s willingness as a subject) and Zack assumed would find some way to continue their relationship at summer’s end. When that time came though Mariah told him straight out that theirs was a summer fling and that she was heading back to school in Wyoming and back to her boyfriend. The night they parted though, despite Zack’s futile pleading that they stay together some way and then giving up when she cut him off which she said was also a Western way, she gave him a parting sexual bout that he still remember fifty years later. Yeah, Zack was women-addled, always was being played by them. Praise be.          

*From the Archives- From The Partisan Defense Committee- There Is Not Justice In The Capitalist Courts- Free Attorney Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

A View From The Left- Origins of Scientific Socialism

Workers Vanguard No. 1097	7 October 2016

Origins of Scientific Socialism By Joseph Seymour

(Young Spartacus pages)

The following is an edited version of an August 20 talk given in the Bay Area by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour.

There does not exist in the U.S. a major party or mass movement that calls itself socialist, much less Marxist. So those of you who are not members of the Spartacist League, how did you come to be sufficiently interested in, or sympathetic to, Marxism to attend this class and presumably do the preparatory readings for it?

Probably you have confronted the contradiction between your own liberal beliefs and values and the realities of American society. You’re likely outraged by racist police atrocities, the rampant killing of unarmed black men who are not even engaged in what’s considered a crime in the U.S. today. You’re likely appalled by the vast and growing economic gulf between the wealthy and the rest of the populace. This was the main focus of the Occupy movement of a few years ago. In short, you want to change society in the U.S., and presumably in the rest of the world, according to your beliefs and values so as to create a good and just society.

If so, you’re in very good company. Obviously, Karl Marx did not begin as a Marxist. He began as what could be called a liberal idealist. This is how Marx expressed his personal philosophy in an essay on graduating from the German equivalent of high school at the age of 17:

“History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy....

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

— “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession” (1835)

Most of the members of the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs were originally motivated by sentiments, though not as eloquently expressed, similar to that of the young Karl Marx. I myself traversed the path from liberal idealism to Marxism as a high school and college student in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I don’t know how political philosophy is taught in the U.S. today in middle school and high school. In my day, we were taught that the principles underlying American society and its government were expressed in the famous passage in the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I believed that at the time.

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, the U.S. was engaged in the so-called Cold War with the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Any high school or college student who was seriously concerned with politics had to confront the question of whether capitalism or socialism was the better economic system, that is, better in terms of their own basic beliefs and values. I did not support communism as practiced in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I concluded that socialism, not capitalism, better corresponded to my own liberal principles. If all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness, then they should have equal material resources to do so, at least initially. Obviously, someone born into an affluent or even average middle-class family in the U.S. was much better positioned to pursue personal happiness than someone born into a peasant family in India or Brazil. In other words, I drew socialist conclusions from liberal premises. And this was not unusual at the time. A number of my classmates in high school and college pretty much thought the same way.

Now, there were two basic differences between what I would describe as my liberal idealist concept of socialism and Marxism. One, I viewed socialism primarily as a means of bringing about an egalitarian redistribution of consumption levels, or living standards, especially on a global scale. I did not then view socialism primarily as a means of raising production and labor productivity to a far higher level than that prevailing in even the most advanced capitalist countries of North America and West Europe.

It’s quite possible, even likely, that some of you have been engaged in environmentalist causes and campaigns. We’ve written a fair amount on environmentalist radicalism as an intellectual current and movement. Several years ago we wrote a reply to a lengthy letter to Workers Vanguard by a left-wing environmentalist, in which we explained our differences with what could be called the environmentalist worldview or mindset. A key passage from that response is:

“The basic goal of Marxist socialism is to liberate the creative powers of humanity, which have been shackled by the capitalist system and earlier forms of class-divided society. Marxists regard the development of the productivity of human labor power as the prime mover of social evolution and the underpinning of historical progress.”

— “In Defense of Science and Technology,” WV No. 843, 4 March 2005

The other major difference between my liberal idealist concept of socialism and Marxism was that I had no idea how to achieve the kind of society I thought should exist, but did not. It was an ideal, not a guide to action. If all men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, how come they actually don’t have these rights and never have had? There have been constant wars throughout history, wars in which not only soldiers but also civilian populations including children have been killed en masse. Slavery and the subjugation of one people by another have been commonplace throughout history. In fact, the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveowner. He justified black chattel slavery in practice, if not at the level of political philosophy.

When I first encountered Marxism, black people in the American South were deprived of all democratic rights and lived under a racist police state. Blacks in South Africa, the large majority of the population, were exploited and oppressed by a privileged white minority. The Arab and Berber populations of Algeria were subjugated by French colonial rule.

So how did one explain the contradiction between liberal and humanitarian principles, principles that I believed in at the time, and social reality past and present? Marx answered that question. He explained: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines” (Critique of the Gotha Programme [1875]). In other words, what is generally considered to be right and wrong, the kind of behavior that is rewarded or punished, is basically determined and conditioned by the level of production and, in class society, how that production is organized.

But let’s start with pre-class society. In particular, let’s consider infanticide, the deliberate killing of newborn children. Today, infanticide is almost universally regarded as a horrific crime, and also an unnatural act on the part of mothers whose children are killed. However, for almost the entire history of our species, infanticide was commonly practiced. The development of agriculture, the cultivation of plants for food, and the raising of livestock for meat occurred only about 10,000 years ago. In the countless millennia before that, human beings lived by gathering plants in the wild and hunting game for food. However, a hunter-gatherer economy can sustain only a very small population relative to the potential reproductive capacity of the human species, especially in the face of sudden changes in climatic conditions such as severe drought.

Our Stone Age ancestors therefore had to and did practice population control. One means was for women to nurse newborn children as long as they possibly could in order to delay subsequent pregnancy. But the main means of population control was infanticide, especially of females. In the main, this was done just by depriving newborn children of the nurturing care needed for them to continue to live. A modern American anthropologist, Marvin Harris, has written in this regard: “Infanticide during the paleolithic period could very well have been as high as 50 percent—a figure that corresponds to estimates made by Joseph Birdsell of the University of California in Los Angeles on the basis of data collected among the aboriginal populations of Australia” (Cannibals and Kings [1977]).

The level of production and how that production is organized not only determines how people—most people in most times—behave, but also how they think. Let’s consider religion, or, particularly, the rejection of religion. Since you’ve come to a class on Marxism, I assume that you’re atheists. If some of you are not, and believe in an omnipotent supernatural being, then we’ll have a very interesting discussion after this class.

But unlike the people in this room, there were no atheists in medieval Europe. Or at least if there were, they didn’t let it be known. Everyone, however great their differences over religious doctrine, believed in a supreme being who not only created the world, but actively intervened in the everyday lives of men and women, for good or ill depending on their behavior. In the literature and documents of the time, there are no references to the term or, more importantly, the concept of atheism. There were frequent accusations that some people worshipped the devil but not that they denied the very existence of God. Personally, I have always found the devil a much more interesting imaginative creation than the Judeo-Christian concept of God. This is purely a personal prejudice, not the Spartacist party line.

Atheism as a distinct intellectual current arose during the Renaissance, in the 16th and 17th centuries. This was the period that also saw the birth of modern science. Disbelief in all-powerful supernatural forces coincided with increasing knowledge of natural forces. Science provided a more realistic and effective understanding than religion of the workings of the natural world. Equally importantly, the application of scientific knowledge through technology mitigated the often destructive effects of natural forces on human lives.

You will notice that I’m wearing eyeglasses. Like many people, my eyesight has deteriorated over time. It’s not a problem for me, because I can acquire and use corrective lenses and adjust the necessary correction every few years. Eyeglasses were first invented in Italy in the late 13th century. However, for many centuries they were a luxury item accessible only to the wealthy. It was only in the 19th century that eyeglasses became available to many people, if not most people, in the Western world. Before then, if your eyesight was deteriorating you had no material means to rectify that condition. So doubtless many resorted to idealist means, that is, they prayed to God to restore their former eyesight.

There’s an interesting historical connection between atheism and optics. One of the main intellectual forerunners of atheistic materialism was Baruch Spinoza, who lived in Holland in the 1600s. He was born into a wealthy Jewish family, but he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a heretic for questioning the literal truth of the Old Testament. He then made a living by grinding high-quality lenses for microscopes and telescopes. In that way Spinoza acquired knowledge of the most advanced science of his day, not only at the theoretical level but also in a practical hands-on way.

After he died, Spinoza became associated with materialism in a different sense, in the conventional vulgar use of the term meaning money-grubbing acquisitiveness. It became fashionable for wealthy men who considered themselves modern-minded to collect lenses made by Spinoza. Pretty soon the demand for Spinoza-made lenses exceeded the remaining supply. So enterprising craftsmen fabricated lenses that they claimed had been found in Spinoza’s old workshops. Fake Spinoza lenses became like the fake Rolexes of the day.

Since the Renaissance, there has been an enormous expansion of scientific knowledge and corresponding applied technology. Nonetheless, religion continues to be a significant component of popular culture, especially in the United States. How come? In the modern world, religious belief is no longer primarily a subjective response to the destructive forces of nature. Rather, it is a subjective solace to the destructive forces of capitalism—the sufferings caused by war, economic immiseration, national, racial and class oppression.

One of Marx’s best-known expressions is that religion is the opium of the people. However, the passage from which this phrase comes is rarely quoted in its entirety. And when it is, it’s usually interpreted in a way contrary to Marx’s intent. Marx was not here addressing pious Christians, exhorting them to go cold turkey on their religious addiction. Rather, he was addressing his fellow atheistic and politically radical intellectuals. He was arguing against the notion that religious belief among the masses could be dispelled through rational argumentation. Thus he wrote:

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

“To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.”

— “Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1844)

In other words, the mass of people will forego the illusion of happiness in an afterlife only when they believe in the possibility of real happiness in this life.

In a broad historical sense, that is actually what happened in much of Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. The spread of atheistic materialism among the working class in Germany, France, Italy and other European countries coincided with and was conditioned by the development of mass parties and trade unions that looked forward to a socialist society, not in some remote future but in the lifetime of their members.

That, however, did not happen in the U.S. The American ruling class has been able, to this day, to exploit and manipulate racial and ethnic divisions so as to prevent the development of what we call political class consciousness among the working class. One consequence is that religiosity is much more prevalent and politically significant among workers in the U.S. than in most other advanced capitalist countries and even some more economically backward Third World countries. In short, religious belief among the exploited and oppressed is inversely proportional to their belief in their ability to overcome their conditions of exploitation and oppression.

Now, the main reading for this class is Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) by Friedrich Engels, who was a lifelong intellectual collaborator of Marx. In this work, Engels contrasted the early schools of socialism that were prevalent in the first part of the 19th century with the doctrine and program developed by Marx and himself, which became the dominant current in the workers movement in the latter part of the 19th century. In particular, he discussed the movements associated with Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon. Why did Engels describe these movements as utopian?

One major reason was that the leaders of these movements appealed to members of all social classes including especially the supposedly benevolent and enlightened members of the ruling elite. The main socialist current in the early 19th century in Britain and also the United States was inspired by the ideas and activities of Robert Owen. Owen started out as an industrial capitalist, a factory owner in Scotland. However, he developed a deep-going sympathy for what was then called the laboring classes. In 1813 he wrote a book titled A New View of Society, in which he expounded his socialist theory and program. He dedicated a section of this book to the prince regent of Britain.

Some of you may be thinking, “How could Robert Owen, an experienced businessman, be so naive as to imagine that the British royal family would introduce socialism into their realm?” However, most of the social groups in the U.S. today that call themselves socialist, even Marxist—such as Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization (ISO)—do effectively the same thing. To be sure, they do it in a less upfront and more camouflaged way than did Owen. Socialist Alternative and the ISO are not calling on the Obama administration to introduce socialism into the U.S. But they do appeal to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to carry out policies that would benefit the working class at the expense of the capitalist class: for example, massively cutting the military budget while proportionately increasing government expenditure on things like education and public health.

But let’s return to the early, pre-Marx schools of socialism, which were a lot more interesting as well as honorable than the small-change reformist groups that we see in the U.S. today. Let’s consider the changing socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to the early socialist movement, and its support among significant sections of the working, lower classes. Until the late 18th century, almost all non-agricultural goods, for example many of the items that you see in this room—chairs, tables, books, clothes, shoes—were made by independent artisans using hand tools and working in small shops. The original and literal meaning of the term “manufactured” is “made by hand.”

What is called the Industrial Revolution began in England and Scotland in the late 18th century. Increasingly, goods were made in factories using machinery driven by steam power. The flood of cheaper factory-made goods drove a large fraction of the artisan population into economic ruin, what was called “pauperism” in the language of the day. Destitute artisans were forced to become factory workers, a condition in every way worse than when they were independent artisans.

Owenite socialism appeared to offer a way out of that dilemma. The crux of its program was the formation of economically self-sufficient communities based on pre-industrial technology. These communities would include farmers and various kinds of artisans—masons, carpenters, weavers, shoemakers—who would produce the necessities of life in the traditional way. The goods would then be pooled and distributed equitably among the members of the socialist communities.

A number of attempts were actually made to establish Owenite collectives or communities, especially in the northern part of the United States, where land was cheap and the governing authorities at the time somewhat more tolerant of such social experiments. The Owenites envisioned that such socialist communities would coexist within the broader capitalist economy and society. More and more people would see for themselves that this was a much better way of organizing society. They would then form additional socialist communities, which would gradually and eventually displace capitalism. In other words, the Owenites projected that socialism would be brought about by force of example, rather than by force of force.

The movement inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier played a somewhat similar role in continental Europe to that of Owenism in the English-speaking world, though it was not as influential. Like the Owenites, the Fourierists advocated economically self-sufficient collectives (they called them phalanxes, I don’t know why) based on pre-industrial technology. There was, however, a very important difference in everyday life in a Fourierist phalanx and an Owenite community, and that difference profoundly influenced the later Marxist concept of a future communist society.

Robert Owen adhered to conventional social and sexual morality. The basic social unit in an Owenite community was the nuclear family. Charles Fourier was a radical sexual libertarian. A distinguishing feature of his vision of socialism was the liberation of women from their age-old condition of oppression and subservience. He not only championed the full social, economic and political rights for women, but also—and this was very unusual at the time—their right to sexual gratification. He condemned the petty tyranny of the patriarchal family, in particular the sexual repression of youth by their parents and other authorities, notably the Christian churches.

The Fourierists were the original socialist advocates of replacing the family by communal means for nurturing and socializing children. They believed this could be attained in the here and now—or more precisely, in the there and then. We Marxists understand that such a radical change in social institutions, and in gender and generational relations, requires a society of material abundance in the future, and a corresponding change in cultural attitudes.

Interestingly, one of the earliest attempts to actually establish a Fourierist phalanx took place in, of all places, Romania. A wealthy but eccentric Romanian nobleman and landowner decided to set up a different social organization based on Fourier’s principles for the peasants who worked on his estate. One of these principles was what in the 19th century was called “free love.” It turned out that these young Romanian peasant men and women enjoyed their newfound sexual freedom. Reports of the strange and scandalous goings-on on this estate soon reached the local Christian clergy and government officials. According to some accounts, they organized a right-wing mob to attack and destroy the Fourierist commune. The peasants bravely defended their “free love” commune but were overcome by superior force.

Unlike Owenites and Fourierists, the Saint-Simonians were not primarily concerned with a more egalitarian distribution of the means of consumption. Rather, they were concerned with increasing production, especially industrial production. Henri de Saint-Simon was a wealthy French nobleman who, among other things, claimed descent from Charlemagne, the founding father of the European feudal state. Far more honorable, from our standpoint, he also served as a French officer in aiding George Washington’s army in the War of Independence against Britain. He was actually a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, which Washington formed for his veteran officers. Interesting guy.

Even in the very early stages of industrial capitalism, Saint-Simon recognized severe irrationalities in this economic system. Some factories went bankrupt and closed down, not because they were technologically deficient but because their owners had misjudged future market conditions. Technical innovations that would increase labor productivity were not utilized because their inventors lacked financing. There were periods even in the early 19th century when production as a whole declined rather than increased. As a result many workers were thrown out of their jobs and suffered economic immiseration. Saint-Simon himself, strictly speaking, was not a socialist. Rather, he was an advocate of what could be called centralized capitalist planning under the direction of bankers.

However, after he died, in 1825, his followers took the next logical step. They advocated the socialization of the means of production under a centralized administration. In their own words:

“A social institution is charged with these functions which today are so badly performed; it is the depository of all the instruments of production; it presides over the exploitation of all the material resources; from its vantage point it has a comprehensive view of the whole which enables it to perceive at one and the same time all parts of the industrial workshop....

“The social institution of the future will direct all industries in the interests of the whole society, and especially of the peaceful laborers.”

— “Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon” (1830), quoted in George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (1969)

This is the germ of the Marxist program of a centrally planned and administered socialized economy. We owe this to the Saint-Simonians. While the Saint-Simonians considered that the working class would greatly benefit from such an economic system, they did not consider that it was the workers who would institute or govern this new social order. That role they assigned to what we call the technical intelligentsia, scientists and engineers. The Saint-Simonians believed that scientists and engineers were committed above all to the rational organization of society and the economy, to increasing production. In this respect the Saint-Simonians expressed liberal idealism in its technocratic variant. They also expressed intellectual elitism.

We sometimes encounter similar attitudes today among young intellectuals—typically university students—who have been newly won to socialism. They think that pretty much everybody like themselves can be convinced of the superiority of socialism. Why is such a belief illusory?

Let’s consider, in particular, the technical intelligentsia. In all capitalist societies, scientists and engineers are a privileged social group whose material interests are much more closely aligned with the capitalist class than the working class. Most engineers are employed by large corporations. Their financial rewards and career advancement depends on their contribution to the corporation’s profits. The men who design new cars for General Motors and Ford and who develop new oil fields for ExxonMobil and BP, are often part of or work closely with these firms’ top management. To be sure, most scientists are not as directly tied to large corporations. Usually they’re employed by universities or government agencies. Nonetheless, their research is ultimately determined by the interests of the capitalist class.

In the latter part of the 19th century, the early schools of socialism were displaced by the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. In fact, very many more people learned about the ideas of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon from Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific than from reading the original writings of these pioneer socialists. There developed political parties and affiliated trade unions supported by millions of workers, whose official program and doctrine was Marxism.

This development was not mainly because Marx and Engels had provided a more realistic and profound analysis of capitalism, although they did do that. Rather the further development of industrial capitalism created the preconditions for a proletarian revolution leading to a socialist society. The steady increase in production and labor productivity indicated the possibility of eventually eliminating material scarcity entirely, that is, creating a society in which the means of consumption are freely distributed to everyone or, in Marx’s words, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

At the same time, the progressive development of labor-saving technology pointed to the possibility of radically reducing the total labor time necessary to produce both the means of consumption and the means of production. In a fully communist society, most time will be what is called free time. Everyone will have the available time and access to the material and cultural resources to fully develop their creative capacity. Everyone will have the opportunity, for example, to engage in research in particle physics, if they want, or to investigate the archeological remains of ancient civilizations, if they want—or to do both, one one year and one the next.

Now, you may think, “Well, that’s a wonderful vision of the future, but how do we get there?” What are the social forces capable of overthrowing capitalism, instituting a planned collectivized economy to open the road to communism on a global scale? In a word: the proletariat.

During the latter part of the 19th century, the further development of capitalism resulted in the increasing demographic and social weight as well as the better organization of the working class. Conversely, there was a decrease in the demographic and social weight of petty proprietors. Many of the sons and daughters of peasant small-holders left the family farm and got jobs in factories or other industrial facilities. Likewise, so did the sons and daughters of artisans and shopkeepers.

At the same time, the destructive irrationality of the capitalist system—based on the private ownership of the means of production and the anarchy of the market—came increasingly to the fore. Periodic economic crises resulted in a massive decline in production. Millions of workers lost their jobs. Factories and other productive facilities were idled.

There is only one progressive solution to that contradiction: proletarian revolution. As Engels explained, in the concluding section of the book that you’ve read:

“The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialised means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialised character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialised production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy of social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organisation, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master—free.”

A decade or so after Engels wrote this, capitalism entered a new historical period, a period that is still with us. This is the epoch of modern imperialism. One of its main features is increasing conflicts between the major capitalist nation-states over raw materials and spheres of exploitation on a global scale. These conflicts have led to two world wars between the major capitalist states. The Second World War ended with the use of a qualitatively more powerful weapon based on a radical breakthrough in technology: the liberation of nuclear energy through the splitting of the atom. In 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the civilian populations of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s a commonplace, somewhat vulgarized, notion that Marx and Engels believed that the proletarian revolution leading to a socialist society was historically inevitable. They did not. And this is clearly stated in the beginning of their most famous and widely read work, the Communist Manifesto (1848):

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or”—I repeat, or—“in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

With the development of nuclear weapons, the destructive irrationality of the capitalist system threatens to destroy civilization if not to annihilate mankind as such. And with that uncomforting thought, I’ll conclude.

*****The Promise of a Socialist Society

*****The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1025	3    1 May 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.

Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.

Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

 

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

 
Here is  good reason why: 

Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives, as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Occasionally Ralph would come to Boston on trips and Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany (or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in the decade, was still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, minus Lena for quite a while now).         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas to fortify them have been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together. The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant international working class anthem, the Internationale for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music. Sam had noted that Ralph with a certain sorrow had stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was despite his and Sam’s continued "good old cause" left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion considerably shortened these days from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying to unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces had in the end and at great cost no trouble in doing so).

 

People, radical intellectuals and thoughtful working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites if not before and despite the obvious failure of capitalist society to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had to agree that they in effect too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war, or do anything else of human good.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave "Third World" liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam and Cuba  dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).        

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issues, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation struggles at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, women question since lately they had noticed that younger activist no longer spoke in such terms but the more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time now, since the ebb flow of the 1960s and which partially caused that ebbing). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world (then) working-class born (his father a bogger himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,  anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a false pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity women, servile, domestic child-producing women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell those wives were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).       

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first reasons which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul. Ralph’s story is a little bit amazing, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to drafted as infantry guys he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more grunts to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had even extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen.

 

When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time and a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him in Vietnam though that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go he was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had come down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Such thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading home.

And the Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they had both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read at home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”